In The Studio

LIVE MIX – COFFEEHOUSE
Mieka Pauley
October 22, 2004

By Aaron Ayscough

October 22nd. It’s a god-awful early Friday and Mieka Pauley’s pining for coffee. After her performance on WERS’s Coffeehouse, she peers at the thin, misty rain outside. “I gotta take the subway home, and the buses,” she says, her small frame somewhat dwarfed by her guitar case.

That’s what 23 year olds do, though; they wander home early mornings in the rain. She’ll be okay.

Pauley got her start singing in Harvard Square and at open mic nights at the nearby Club Passim. She wowed audiences there, though she nearly didn’t bother, at first. “I was going to Harvard and it was just right across the street,” she says. “I don’t know if I would’ve gone if I wasn’t so close.” The same lucky laziness led her to switch her major at said school. “I started off doing physics; it ended up being too difficult,” she says. “It takes up so much time, so much mental investment, and I wanted to do other stuff.”

So she switched to biological anthropology, still worlds away from her current musical career. But in biological anthropology, Pauley found an unlikely hero in the late great academic Stephen Jay Gould. “When he first started, he was this revolutionary academic, speaking out against what everybody else put down as doctrine,” she explains. “He came in as the anti-voice. The thing is that, years later, he’s established. Yet he’s still raising all his evidence to come to his grand point again. And the grand point - well we’re like ‘Duh, of course,’ because he’s accepted now.”

Since she graduated in 2002, Pauley’s been busy establishing herself, raising her own evidence. She’s sung the National Anthem at Fenway Park, won BMI’s Rock Boat Song Contest, and recently placed first in the Rocky Mountain Folks Fest Songwriter Showcase. Even at eight in the morning, it’s easy to understand how. Pauley’s got a voice like a post-coital cigarette; it imbues her songs with an emotional resonance rarely heard on the streets of Harvard Square.

She spent this past year touring up and down the East coast. Her website (http://www.mieka.com/) boasts a whole laundry list of major artists she’s performed alongside, including, among many others, Wyclef Jean, the Black Eyed Peas, and Eric Clapton.

“I didn’t get to meet him,” she says of the latter. “I was performing the side stage.”

That’s what 23 year olds do, though; they perform the side stage for legendary guitar players. And they’re modest about it. She’ll be okay.